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String Beans, Yellow Wax

Yellow wax beans boiled with butter, flour, salt, and optional beef broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,080 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

String Beans, Yellow Wax

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. String the beans with a knife and break them in half.

  2. Soak the beans in cold water for 30 minutes, then wash them.

  3. Place the beans in a saucepan and cover with cold water.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the beans slowly for 3 hours, replenishing with boiling water if needed.

  2. After 2 hours, mix the butter and flour, then stir into the beans.

  3. Add the salt and cook for an additional hour until very soft.

  4. For added flavor, stir in beef broth before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Beans + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yellow wax beans
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender vegetable over long simmering.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the beans a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Mixed with butter and stirred in, it thickens the cooking liquid slightly.

The step that matters

Boil the beans slowly for 3 hours. A gentle simmer softens the beans evenly without breaking them apart. Keeping the cooking liquid topped up with boiling water, rather than cold, prevents the pot from stalling and the beans from toughening.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, beef):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, beef. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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